The air inside her father's home office was thick with the scent of unpunished sins. It was a room preserved in amber, a time capsule of the man Stephen Cole had pretended to be. Sarafina stood in the doorway, the light from the hallway casting a long, jagged shadow across the Persian rug. The silence here was not empty; it was heavy, vibrating with the echoes of phone calls made in the dead of night and the scratch of a pen against paper that had never seen the light of a precinct desk.
She crossed the room, her boots silent on the floorboards. On the mahogany desk, a crystal glass sat half-finished, the amber liquid inside filmed over with a thin layer of dust. It was a ghost's drink. Beside it lay a stack of files, their edges yellowed, detailing the rise of the Mcwell empire. Her father had spent twenty years hunting Joseph Mcwell, yet as Sarafina looked around the room, she didn't see the workspace of a hunter. She saw the lair of a man who was being hunted back.
The silver key Joseph had slipped into her pocket felt like a brand against her thigh. She ignored the red blinking light of the GPS tracker for a moment, setting it on the desk next to her father's service weapon. She needed to understand the man she was mourning before she could kill the man who had taken him.
Sarafina knelt in the footwell of the desk, the cramped space smelling of old leather and floor wax. She remembered being six years old, hiding here during games of hide and seek, listening to the rhythmic tap of her father's dress shoes as he paced the room. Back then, the sound had been a heartbeat. Now, it was a funeral march.
She began to press against the wood, her fingers tracing the grain with a surgeon's precision. She knew her father's habits. Stephen Cole was a man of compartments. He believed that if you hid a thing well enough, it ceased to exist.
Near the back corner, a floorboard gave a hollow, mocking groan. Sarafina pulled a pocketknife from her belt and wedged the blade into the seam. With a sharp, splintering protest, the wood gave way.
Beneath the floor lay the truth.
She reached into the dark void, her pulse a frantic drum against her ribs. Her fingers closed around two objects: a cheap, plastic burner phone and a single sheet of heavy, cream-colored cardstock.
She ignored the phone for now, her focus narrowing on the paper. It was the same expensive weight as the note Joseph had tossed into the mud at the cemetery. The same scent of cedar and expensive, cold cologne clung to the fibers. This wasn't a piece of evidence. This was a dialogue.
Sarafina unfolded the paper, her breath hitching in her throat.
Stephen, you are playing a game with no winners. You have a daughter to think about. Don't make me remind you who owns the streets she walks on.
The signature at the bottom was not a name. It was a mark. A sharp, elegant M that looked less like a letter and more like a blade.
The words didn't just threaten her father; they claimed her. Joseph Mcwell had been watching her since before she was a woman. He had used her name like a bargaining chip in a high-stakes negotiation. Sarafina felt a visceral wave of heat wash over her, a mixture of terror and a dark, twisted sort of recognition. Her father hadn't been a martyr. He had been a negotiator.
She looked at the burner phone. It was ancient, the screen scratched and dull. When she pressed the power button, it groaned to life with a low-resolution glow. There was only one contact in the logs. No name. Just a string of zeros.
She scrolled through the messages. They weren't coordinates for drug drops or lists of dirty cops. They were observations.
She looks like you when she's angry, Stephen.
I saw her at the academy graduation. She wears the blue well. It's a pity it won't protect her.
Tell her to stay out of the East End tonight. My men are restless.
Sarafina dropped the phone onto the desk as if it had burned her. Joseph hadn't just been her father's enemy. He had been a silent partner in her upbringing, a shadow guardian who had watched her grow from a girl into a weapon. Every accomplishment, every promotion, every moment she thought she was becoming her own person, he had been there, documenting her like a specimen under glass.
The betrayal was a physical weight, heavier than the flag she had buried that morning. Her father had allowed this monster into their lives. He had traded his integrity for her safety, and in doing so, he had handed Joseph the leash.
She stood up, her eyes landing on the GPS tracker Joseph had given her. It continued to blink, a steady, rhythmic pulse of red that seemed to mock her. He was waiting for her. He had known she would find the floorboard. He had known that once she realized the police were corrupt and her father was a fraud, she would have nowhere else to go.
He wanted her to come to him. He wanted to see if the Little Bird he had watched for two decades had finally grown talons.
Sarafina picked up her father's service weapon. She checked the magazine, the metallic click of the slide echoing in the silent office like a definitive sentence. She didn't feel like a detective anymore. The badge on her belt felt like a toy, a relic of a life that had never actually existed.
She reached for the cream cardstock and a fountain pen from the desk. Her hand was steady, her mind a cold, crystalline lake of resolve. If Joseph wanted to communicate through letters, she would give him exactly what he asked for.
She wrote three words on the back of his threat, the ink bleeding dark and thick into the expensive paper.
I am coming.
She didn't sign it. She didn't need to.
Sarafina grabbed the silver key and the tracker, leaving the office without looking back at the ghost of Stephen Cole. She was no longer a daughter seeking justice. She was a predator entering the woods to find the one who had made her an orphan.
She walked out to her car, the night air of Blackwood tasting of salt and impending rain. She climbed inside and placed the tracker on the passenger seat. The red light led the way, a digital breadcrumb trail into the mouth of the abyss.
As she pulled out of the driveway, her phone vibrated in her pocket. It wasn't her work phone. It was the burner she had taken from the floorboard.
A new message illuminated the screen.
The East Gate is open, Sarafina. Don't keep me waiting in the dark.
The monster wasn't just waiting for her. He was welcoming her home.